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Five things the royal baby knows about the world

By Linda Geddes

The fresh prince might be just a couple of hours old, but the future king of the UK already knows a surprising amount about the world.

1. Kate is the centre of his universe

While the baby might not know the story of Kate Middleton’s journey from girl-next-door to Duchess of Cambridge he already knows her voice and smell, having already spent months getting used to them in the uterus. In one study, babies just a few hours old demonstrated a preference for their mum reading the Dr Seuss book And To Think That I Heard It On Mulberry Street over a stranger reading the same story.

Babies also seem to be attracted to their mother’s smell. Newborns offered a choice between a clean and an unwashed breast will opt for the smellier one; five-day-old babies will also wriggle their way towards a cotton pad that has been worn by their mother. Recent research suggests that babies are being drawn towards smelly secretions from the nipples, rather than the scent of milk itself.

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Within hours, the young heir will also have memorised Kate’s face and should be able to pick her out from a group of similar-looking women, which is remarkable given newborns’ relatively poor eyesight.

2. His future subjects are people, not dogs or horses

Babies seem hard-wired to appreciate the proportions of human faces and know that they hold special significance. Show a newborn a collection of shapes resembling a human face and it will choose to look at this over the same shapes organised into a random pattern. The little fellow also cares about whether people are paying attention to him or not. When newborn babies in Cambridge, UK, were shown a picture of a woman with her eyes open and another where her eyes were closed, the babies spent significantly longer looking at the open-eyed picture. Newborns also prefer to look at happy faces over sad faces – and may even be able to contemplate their own future.

3. Being third in line to the British throne is different to being sixteenth

Baby Wales is now third in line to the throne, after his grandfather, Prince Charles, and dad, William. When Zara Phillips’ baby is born in January, he or she will be sixteenth.

Although it will be some time before the fresh prince can count to 10, he already understands this difference. Until recently, people had assumed that an appreciation of numbers as abstract concepts was something you learned, rather than possessing from birth. But when newborn babies were played recordings of spoken syllables repeated a set number of times – “ba ba ba”, for example – and shown collections of circles or squares on a screen, babies could spot when the numbers matched up. Separate studies have hinted that the brain contains specialised “accumulator neurons” that fire in response to different numbers of objects.

However, though babies may start categorising sounds and rhythms even before birth, they remain “international” in the sense that they can hear and discriminate all 150 speech sounds that occur across the world’s languages until they are about nine months old. After that their brains begin to specialise, which is why Japanese speakers often fail to differentiate between “r” and “l” sounds, for example.

5. God Save the Queen has a beat

Ok, so the new future king cannot yet click his fingers in time with a tune, but newborns do seem tuned to detect rhythm from the moment they emerge. When adults are wired up to sensors that detect electrical signals in the brain and played a regular rhythm, their brain produces a characteristic signature if that rhythm is disrupted. The same is true of babies. When newborns were played variations of a rock rhythm in which certain beats were omitted, the babies’ brains detected when the beat critical to the overall rhythm was removed.